Art critic-curator to lecture at Albany museum

Bob Nickas, an independent critic and curator based in New York City, has organized 79 exhibits since 1984, including a stint at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the 1993 Venice Biennale. He’s coming to Albany to speak about his new book, “Catalog of an Exhibition” (2011, 2nd Cannons Publications), which takes one or two objects from each show and reinterprets them with the hindsight of history.

“The book is my retrospective,” he says. But “I did not put the book together in the way a band might assemble a greatest hits package.” Instead, it’s an “idiosyncratic” collection that includes lesser-known artists, such as the now-defunct duo Wallace & Donohue, rather than, say, Jeff Koons.